Should I go 1440p or 4K with an RTX 4070 for future games?

[JonathanS]

I’m trying to decide between a 1440p and a 4K monitor for my new setup, but I’m worried my RTX 4070 won’t be enough to drive the higher resolution smoothly in newer games. I see benchmarks showing playable frame rates at 4K with settings adjusted, but I’m not sure if that’s the right move for titles coming out over the next few years.

[EthanH]

Yeah I tried this last year. I went 1440p with an RTX 4070 and kept most things on high. Old titles felt great, and I stayed well above 100 fps in many games. When I tested 4K, I had to drop a lot of settings to keep in the 60s. It was playable, but not consistently smooth at max settings in the newest titles.

[AndrewFJ]

I kept testing because I worried about the future. Sometimes the dips came from CPU or RAM in poorly threaded titles, not just GPU power. I saw moments where GPU usage looked high but the frame rate still stuttered. So I started wondering if the bottleneck is really the GPU, or if something else is tripping the performance. Is that the bottleneck for you too?

[Kenneth81]

I ended up sticking with 1440p for most days. It gave me clean, high frame rates and less heat, and I could still enjoy the visuals without nonstop tweaking. When I did think about 4K, it felt like paying a lot for a few extra pixels I might not notice in the moment.

[Sofia.M]

On the flip side the upscaling route with the 4070 helped me taste a 4K feel without the raw load. DLSS style frame generation can smooth things out, but it isn’t magic and you still notice differences in some scenes.